September 2010 » book review

Home Sentiments

The Home Within Us: Romantic Houses, Evocative Rooms
by Bobby McAlpine with Susan Sully
Rizzoli International Publications, Inc., New York, NY; 2010
240 pages; hardcover; approximately 160 color photos; $55
ISBN 978-0-8478-3289-7

Reviewed by Annabel Hsin

When five-year-old Bobby McAlpine showed his mother his first ever floor plan, drawn on the back of a Whitman’s Sampler box, she responded, “That’s very nice, but the dining room is too far away from the kitchen.” Even to this day, McAlpine tends to break from the conventional, often beginning his architectural designs at the heart of the structure and working his way out. “Combing the interior tirelessly for math and order – and refining its responsiveness to the souls who will live there – I leave the outside for the last,” McAlpine writes in his new book The Home within Us: Romantic Houses, Evocative Rooms.

Growing up in rural Alabama, McAlpine writes that he was an introspective child who created an imaginary paradise for himself that included his ideal home. Today, McAlpine strives to create for his clients the “curative home” – a place to recover from the demands of the exterior world. A self-proclaimed romantic, he draws inspiration from Norman, Mediterranean, Classical and vernacular English, Dutch and Scottish precedents, melding them with his own set of rules to create architecture meant to evoke particular human emotions.

The collaborative works of McAlpine’s design firm, Montgomery, AL-based McAlpine Tankersley Architecture, and his interiors firm, McAlpine Booth & Ferrier Interiors in Atlanta and Nashville, TN, are presented in four sections through generous photo spreads. More than 20 homes and follies constructed in the past three decades are featured, each with a description of McAlpine’s thoughts, from design conception to completion.

The four sections are organized to introduce specific design approaches. The first, “Harmony of Opposites,” features homes that demonstrate McAlpline’s penchant for juxtaposing materials such as stone and steel with wood and thatch. Rooms often contain the unexpected – low niches or alcoves within two-story-tall spaces and lushly upholstered furniture on top of bare stone floors. “The Way Within,” showcases houses with strategically placed side entries and exterior spaces to manipulate the procession into the home. In “Ancient Modern,” McAlpine combines Modernism with ancient architecture. Lastly, “Sanctuary for the Self,” focuses on secondary residences where McAlpine stretches his creative imagination and designs the occasionally wild flipside of primary houses.

One common thread throughout the book is McAlpine’s ability to combine unlikely architectural elements to create bold statements. In the introduction, he writes, “To create spaces with a broad emotional spectrum, there has to be a pendulum that strikes far to the left and far to the right. A rhythm of the grand and the humble, the exhilarating and the calm, the bold and the tender must be struck at a regular rate. This can show up in a million different ways – in the scale of a room, the material, or the math.”

The highlight of the book is the chapter on McAlpine’s home. The exterior, which was inspired by Sir Edwin Lutyens’ Homewood, features a cedar roof complemented with honey-colored stucco facades, flat-roof dormers, large bay windows and a vine-covered pergola leading to a carriage house. In the interior, McAlpine experimented with a style he terms “monastery modern.” He left out traditional details such as crown molding and window casings to give the room a sense of permanence. Instead, there are two-story columns that do not reach the ceilings, a 70-ft.-long side aisle with a railing that has pickets placed shoulder-width apart and an exaggeratedly low mezzanine in a soaring salon.

Throughout the course of several years, McAlpine’s versatility is revealed through his home’s three different stages of interior design – each representing a period of his life. Presented chronologically, the first stage is a self-portrait, which he explains as a “public delivery – me at my best with everyone.” He filled the salon with treasured antiques, his collection of corner chairs placed directly atop flooring made of variegated concrete pavers. The next interpretations are contradicting stages – an extroverted “white phase,” where he paired his traditional corner chairs with modern accent furniture, and an introspective phase that consisted of dark linseed oil-stained plaster walls and graphite finished columns.

McAlpine and his firms’ unique body of work and sincere text make for a wonderful read and an attractive coffee table book. Clients, architects and interior designers alike will find his techniques inspiring and useful for their own projects, particularly the potential outcomes of juxtaposing opposing materials and details. The bold results yielded with McAlpine’s strategies will leave readers contemplating what direction their work will take in the next three decades.  

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